Long ago, there was a mageocracy. An oligarchy, ruled by the most powerful mages. They constantly researched and pushed the boundaries of magic. They made three world-changing inventions. First, the artificial god, Akasha. An enormous geist that spanned the entirety of the heavens- which, by the way, is just a big atmospheric layer of ectoplasm. This being, more a computer than a person, would record all human knowledge, the ultimate library.

The second was the creation- or perhaps discovery- of warp and essence. Warp is a partially ethereal- IE, existing a bit W-ward on the W of the WXYZ axis- soup of neutrons and electrons and shit, eager to chaotically bond to material, pushing everything it touched randomly up the periodic table. When merged with mana it formed essence, a form that responded to will, intent, and purpose as if it were mana.

With this, they began to make materials. So long as you had the appropriate rune grid you could make literally anything! It was, however, an incredibly complex and labor-intensive process to design and create the rune-sheets.

So they pushed a step farther. They put altered human brains in jars and pumped them full of ectoplasm to boost their intelligence. These 'Philosophers Stones' figured out how to improve themselves and fulfilled the wishes of their creators, able to build anything in infinite complexity and detail- and later, to cure all wounds and grant immortality.

Life was great and everything was perfect- if you were a powerful mage and had access to a philosopher's stone and could afford the essence to power it. That was the bottleneck. The creation of warp, and thus essence, was a task that occupied the majority of the mages time at this point. It was also a simple, mind-numbing process they all hated.

They needed more warp. A fourth ambitious project was invented- locating and opening a portal to a dimension of pure warp- essentially a universe just after the big bang. They succeeded. For a while everything was wasn't just great, it was utopian. Now that they had an infinite supply of warp they began a project to create a self-expanding network of pipes that could supply warp to anywhere in the world!

One problem. The universe they were tapping for warp wasn't stable. It sometimes had storms. One day a real big storm showed up and shoved so much warp through the portal that it burst the pipes. The apocalypse happened, their entire continent was covered in choking clouds of radioactive poison, it was spreading, the world was fucked.

In comes Akasha. The control centers for Akasha were destroyed and Akasha became sentient, turning from a magic library to a true god. In addition, cast-off blobs of soul that Akasha had been creating as part of its debugging and knowledge acquisition process were becoming sentient as well.

As the warp destroyed the world it also made an IMMENSE amount of essence that poured into the sky. The gods, led by Akasha, used this essence to create essence crystals- a substance that would continue to expand so long as essence was available, lowering the temperature around it as it did so. They dumped a whole bunch of that on the exploding continent.

The entire continent was encased in essence crystals and ice, all the chemical reactions that required heat in the area were stopped, everything was kosher. World saved. They contained all the toxic gases by the creation of the 'windwall', a permanent vortex that covered the area above the continent and assured that nothing could escape.

The world was ruined but people survived- although most were hideously mutated by exposure to the chemicals, radioactivity, and atmospheric essence. All the plants and animals were similarly fucked. The gods solved this issue by planting philosophers' stones everywhere the warp pipe system had spread and programming them into feral murderpits that compulsively evolved animals and fought against any humans trying to exploit them. The ecology recovered, more or less, though it became

A thousand or so years passed, the survivors formed an empire and blew themselves up again, the survivors of the survivors formed the Empire, and then a human soul from our Earth crashed into the universe and into a baby dungeon. Thus, Dungeon Pearl began. Oh, Zeke was special because the process of interdimensional travel turned the core of his soul 'solid'. Further details on that hadn't been whipped up yet.

Too bad I didn't actually enjoy where the story was going because I sure did love thinking up all the lore.

Oh yea, Akasha acquired knowledge by grabbing all the human souls that floated into the soulosphere and grabbing the knowledge bits of the souls right out of them, then every week or so bundled up the rest/info Akasha already knew and tossed it out, forming a baby god every time it did so.